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How the decision to bomb ISIS was made

“I had not heard the word ‘genocide’ used in the Situation Room before,” the official said. “That word has a lot of weight.”

The reports from the intelligence community and the State Department were vivid and compelling, the official said: People were dying of hunger and thirst, women risked being enslaved and the existence of a religious minority looked imperiled. It more than met the legal definition of genocide, aides told Obama.

“While we have faced many difficult humanitarian challenges, this was in a different category,” the official said. “This was qualitatively different from even the awful things we have confronted in different parts of the region because of the targeted nature, the scale of it, the fact this is a whole people. That kind of shakes you up, gets your attention.”

After a 90-minute meeting Thursday morning, the president headed to Fort Belvoir to sign a veterans health bill, making no mention of the worsening conditions in northern Iraq or his private deliberations on what to do about it…

The major concern was the seizure of the Mosul Dam. If it were ever breached, the result would be catastrophic, causing the flooding of Baghdad and the Kurdish capital of Erbil, officials said.

“We were watching some metrics to have a sense of tipping points,” one official said. “And one of them was very much the dam.”

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As long as it was Christians being beheaded, buried alive or sold into slavery, Obama wasn’t about to do anything except have the press office issue a “strong statement.”

Wethal on August 9, 2014 at 2:25 PM

Agree. The 200 missing African girls were hung out to dry – because?

This has a Clintonesque quality. The news feeds from the press pushing an issue that led to the end of the Yugo as an automobile, and the rearrangement of the Balkans match the current decision of the MSM to feed to the public the images of the entrapped minority

The Islamic State is not a ragtag force of militants, but rather a conventional army equipped with tanks and other heavy weapons and equipment, according to analysts and the Pentagon. The first American air strike was aimed at a mobile artillery site threatening Irbil, according to the Pentagon.

Plus, they are well financed. The group receives funding from donors in wealthy Persian Gulf states and the militants have seized critical infrastructure in areas they control. Currently they are attempting to seize massive hyrdroelectric dams in Mosul and Haditha that provide much of Baghdad’s electricity. They have seized oil fields in Syria and Iraq.

“ISIL is no longer simply a terrorist organization,” McGurk said. “It is now a full-blown army.”

The Pentagon estimates the militants now control about a third of Iraq’s territory.

Take the electricity from Baghdad, to win Baghdad. Saddam’s guard are joining ISIS I hear